HOW TO SAVE CIVILIZATION

I suppose that on St. Patricks Day we should wear green and drink ale and find four leafed clovers. I did none of the above because I don't own a green shirt, ale tastes like socks worn three days straight, and my aunt and dead brother are the only people in my family who ever had a knack for seeing the leaves for the forest, or however the adage doesn't go.

Instead I went to church because it is Saturday night and that's when I go to church.

We are studying Galatians, expository fashion, verse by verse, and it has been very helpful. Also apropos for today, I lean over to my friend and whisper, as the Irish were from Galatia. I don't think she believes me, but she gives a polite nod. After that I wonder if I should believe me too.

But it's true. I read a book a few years ago, How the Irish Saved Civilization, an easily fascinating historical delve that would make any Irishman hook his thumbs behind his suspenders and leap a little higher with pride. I suppose I ought to count myself in that group, but I'm plumb out of suspenders.

Tonight's reading, from Chapter 3, is when Paul goes all mad-professorial on those Galatians, ranting about their foolishness and giving them historical evidence, as well as faith evidence (if such a thing is possible), for the finished work of the gospel. Paul was telling those Galatians that they could not save anything, let alone civilization, and certainly not their own souls.

Isn't it nearly a miracle then, I think on my way home, that those with whom Paul was furious because of their foolish attempts to do, do, do, would be the ones who, in a way, saved the rest of us with what they did?

Inside of me, the Irish part of me perhaps, but the human part of me for sure, there is a nature that does; it checks off lists and tally marks accomplishments and makes plans and rarely truly hopes in God. But there is another part of me that aches so deeply to know the truth of what Paul was telling those in the church at Galatia: what you do holds weight, but only because God, in his grace, has given it to you to hold and steward. It matters, but only because of what He did, only because He counted it as righteousness.

Those foolish Galatians must have finally understood that—understood that they were a people with a work ethic, but also a people with a message worth saving, treasuring, and keeping. And so, because they realized they couldn't save their souls, they saved civilization instead.

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

Go celebrate some common grace today.

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STANDING STILL

Eight months ago when my car went in for an oil change, something happened with the stereo, and since then the options have been limited, as in, there are none. This has worked for me amiably. I use the inordinate amount of driving time that it takes to go anywhere in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex to think or, if I am feeling generous or anxious, pray.

Once, when I was stuck in construction (which is about as usual as not being stuck in construction), I pulled out my car's manual and paged through to see if there was a fix for the stereo situation. My guess is that they write those manuals for engineers and not artists. I stuffed it back in the glove-compartment beside chapstick, mechanic receipts, and (don't tell anybody) thirty dollars in cash that I keep there for emergency gas or toll situations.

The car has always been my thinking place, my best and most descriptive writing has been scribbled out on the backs of receipts and the fronts of anything else available. I see best when I'm in my car, figuratively and literally. I think it's because I'm moving.

I've been feeling discouraged recently, creatively dry, emotionally zapped, and academically stagnate. Nothing challenges me except the sort of challenges that mostly feel frustrating and not exhilarating. I think it's because I'm not moving.

A friend of mine here is the very loyal, very steady, very dependable sort, and she is always cocking an eyebrow at me and asking me if I'm "running away." What she means is, am I getting cold feet, feeling hemmed in, too safe, too comfortable, and too bored. To which I reply, most of the time, in the affirmative.

One of the most oft quoted lines from that set of fantasy penned by CS Lewis is also one of the lines about Aslan that I have recalled since I was seven, "He is not safe, but He is good." And I remember that nearly every time my soul yearns to be outside of what is safe, predictable, normal, and still.

I remember that a life with God is not safe, but it is sure. I remember that this life makes no guarantees about anything, but that we are held and known in the process. And I remember that the gospel prevents us from ever feeling truly comfortable, but always feeling truly kept.

I have to remember that especially when I find myself to be simply standing still in the silence.

BROKEN in PLACE

Years ago when my body was spent from months of a mystery sickness and my soul was spent from failure, I moved in with a friend and somehow healed. It was a quote from Hemingway that help that healing along, "The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places" and I had to believe that was true.

You don't get to be twelve and not experience brokenness and you don't get to be sixty and escape it entirely, but I don't think the brokenness feels real until you are midway there. I am midway there and those broken places, oh, they are so broken.

Every few weeks I hear of yet another peer who is divorcing, another friend who couldn't stand the fear of life alone and so married in desperation, another friend who has lost a spouse or a child or a dream. The world is breaking us and we feel nothing but weakened by it.

I never understood Paul: His strength is made perfect in my weakness. Isn't Christ strength already perfect and how could my weakness make it better?

But these days I think less about perfection in an "Everything is right" sort of way and more about it in an "Everything is resolved" sort of way. Like a cadence that falls and lands on the the perfect ending note. That note is no more perfect when played by itself, but if that particular song were to end on any other note, it would feel unresolved, imperfect.

I think about strength now like that.

Being strong in the broken places only means that there is no other place for us to land but there, on that strength, on that note, in that place.

I take comfort in that because the world is breaking us and it will continue to do so. But Christ's love (and His strength) is what holds us there, kept, sustaining, until that final cadence falls and the Whole Places begin.

Grace Grabbed

It's the story of ten men who wanted pity and got a miracle instead. And it's the story of me.

I know my leprous spots. I know them well, the loss of feeling, the flesh rubbed raw, the broken parts of me that I want to hide and can't.

All I want is a little pity and He gives a miracle instead.

Last night I remember the ten lepers who were healed and the one who comes back and I want so desperately to be the one who comes back. I want to not forget what He has done and what I could not. But forgetting is what I do well and here is why:

I asked for pity, received a miracle, and am desperately afraid that the miracle was a one time occurrence, so I run. Because what if He sees that He has healed me? What if He takes it back? What if I stumble on this and fall on this and lose this, and He takes back the miracle?

I run instead. Grab my grace, gather my wits and run.

This week I am exercising gratefulness. Because to return to the miracle worker is humbling, to return is to submit that there might be more brokenness to be healed, to return is to say to Him "There is more of me that can't reach You."

Last night our church gathered for the first night in a series of five nights of prayer and praise. I opened my eyes during one song, looked across the room at arms spread wide, voices ringing out, heads thrown back, and I heard the sound of gratefulness.

Gratefulness that says "I was looking for pity and got life instead."

Brian Kershisnik

Curves

It doesn't take a seasoned flier to see that the world really is flat. From up here the horizon stretches on forever, illuminated by the orange of a setting sun. I can see how the pre-Columbusians could have not known the world was more than what they could see from their vantage. And here, centuries later, we're still hoping our suspicions about what the world really is or isn't are really true after all.

It doesn't take a seasoned liver, though, to see that the world is not quite so curved as we'd like it to be.

I used to think that my sins counted against me, tally marks piling up ready to eliminate me from the game entirely. My good works worked in much the same way, do enough and perhaps it will all balance out. I say that I used to think this, but the truth is that I still think it much of the time. I am not beyond a little tally marking of my own in regard to you either. Grace is my second nature, but sin is my first one.

I set out on my exploration of God, setting the spirit's wind in my sails and I'm finding the world is flatter than I once thought. Sin is the great leveler and this both stings and comforts. It stings because I want to be better than you and it comforts because I know I never will.

God knew we would want to grade on a curve, so he flattened it for us.

Paul knew we'd struggle with a flattened world and so he hurried to assure: "Should we keep on sinning so that grace may abound?" He shudders. "May it never be!"

But I'm conscious still of those tally marks, not because I want to measure them against yours, but because I do want to keep grace in the front, abounding, my piteous sin there to point out its constant need and goodness.

I can appreciate Christopher Columbus and his exploratory efforts: it is far too easy to take advantage of a flat earth and easy walk.

 (Horizon by Joeri Bosma)

walk on

It's the rhythms of grace that are the hardest for me. I think. The finished work of grace, this I understand. The unfinished work of grace, the kind we have to wait for until heaven, this I understand.

It's the rhythms. The ebb and the flow. The here, so strongly and tangible one day, and gone, so hard and difficult the next. It's not the grace that changes, I know this. It's the inbetweens.

This morning my boss read the end of Matthew 11 aloud in our staff meeting and I felt my heart choke, my eyes well up:

"Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it.

Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you.

Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly."

This year has been a lot of just learning grace, sitting in it, basking in it, letting the fullness of what it implies wash over me. Bathe me in comfort, love, joy, fullness.

But this passage about rest is full of active verbs and this is what I feel my heart catch on this morning.

Get away with me. Take a real rest. Walk with me. Work with me. Learn the rhythms. Keep company with me.

This seems like an awful lot of work to do rest.

And there's a strange comfort in that. The comfort is this: rest is intentional too. It means saying no to being busy, choosing to be busy being unbusy. It means not answering my phone. It means letting the text messages build up. It means sitting with my roommates when I could be doing other things. It means lighting a candle, laughing, choosing rest.

The thing about rhythm is that the beat doesn't change, it is grace, grace, always grace. But the melody does. And I am learning to fill in life around the steady tempo of grace.

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I am learning that to know where we’re headed, we first have to know where we came from. This means, too, that we find out where we went wrong in the first place. No one has to be convinced that something went wrong somewhere in the bodies and beauty department. Stand in a grocery aisle and figure out how to beat those pesky inches, woo your disinterested man, and find more perfect clothes for perfect bodies. Something has gone wrong. So where?

It was at a tree. A food laden tree. Something good, beautiful, and delectable gone horribly wrong.

(Will Deutsch)

The beginning of beginnings, Genesis, where food was made and food was eaten and where all of our food issues began.

Strange, isn’t it, that one of our principles struggles is still there? With food?

We starve from it, binge on it, measure it out, disgust ourselves with it, pride ourselves on it, obsess over recipes, and TIVO our favorite cooking shows. Rarely do we see food as the perfect provision and perfect protection that it was designed to be. Provided for our health; protection from death.

God created food: a perfect provision for His creation.

Then He clearly defined it as right or wrong: a perfect protection for his children. He set up His boundaries, endlessly good ones that felt good too, until they bumped up against the one ‘don’t’ rule: don’t eat of this tree.

And this is the tree she ate from. First the woman and then the man.

Ignoring the plenty and subversively skirting the mandate by a subtle legalism, “God says don’t eat of it AND don’t touch it,” she fell the boundaries that God so lovingly placed on her and him and all of us.

Don’t we do this too?

Don’t we see the plenty and choose instead the smaller portion, the lesser good? We add to the boundaries given. Sinking deeply into diets or delectable feasts, feeling helpless against the siren call that is food.

God calls out: Where are you?

And we hide, behind exercise, behind enhancement, behind extra weight. We hide.

We hide because it is easier to hide than to be known. We’ve eaten off the tree of knowledge and now we think we know.

Yet still He seeks us. Pursues us. Finds us, shivering and scratching under the weight of man-made garments and expectations. I’m there. Are you too?

An all this because we added to what God said. He gave good boundaries and we made them smaller and tighter, thinking that more rules will keep us safer. God has said don’t eat of the fruit, but we think that it’s safer to just not touch it at all?

This is our great sin. This is our great fall. We add to what God has said and the boundaries become cages. We imagine He is a harsher God than He is.

We eat the fruit thinking it will make us like God and really all it does is make us into our own god. And we are powerless gods, always trying to find things to bulk us, beautify us, fix us.

All the while He is still giving perfect provision and perfect protection. The second time was in a much less beautiful environment. Dark, though midday, the place of the skull. A broken, bleeding, and bruised man. He is saying it is finished and we can hardly believe it is true.

So we are still adding to it. Principles. Practices. Helping God, we think, with clearer expectations on His people and on us. Don’t eat it, we say, or touch it. Or surely you will die.

The truth is that we are finished. Perfect in Christ’s eyes and through His provision. Nothing can be added or removed from you to make you more of who you’re intended to be in God.

He looks on you and sees clean, pure, perfect righteousness and beauty.

I caught myself tonight saying "almost a year."

A year?

I told the story of how I'd totaled my car and yelled expletives at God. How I'd hit February of 2010 and how I confessed while sitting on a green shag carpet that I'd lost my faith in Jesus. I told of my best friend faithfully listening to my doubts and questions, reading through the Bible with me, fasting for 40 days with me.

I told the story of a book handed to me by my pastor. I told of listening to this sermon so many times in a week that I nearly had parts of it memorized. Of buying a ticket to Fort Worth on a whim and no prayer. Rediscovering the richness of a friendship I had thought was hopelessly broken.

I told of hitting walls and crying on the back stairs when I opened a card from my Mom. I told of the week I sold nearly everything I owned, of packing my small car, of moving here with no plan or certainty.

A year?

I told of sitting in the second row of my new church in a foreign city and understanding for the first time what Paul meant when he talked about the eyes of his heart being opened. The eyes of my heart fluttered open as the teacher taught through the first chapter of Genesis. The book of beginnings.

I was beginning. He was beginning me. Again.

What mercy!

I told of provision every step of the way. Times where mere pennies were in my bank account and He sustained. Times where the only thing certain was Him and where for the first time in my life I was okay with that. I said that around every turn He surprised me. He sustained me. He chose me. He wasn't just doing or being good to me, He in the deepest essence of his character was good.

A year ago.

It feels such a short time, weeks even. I still feel new to Texas, unsure, unhome.

It feels ages ago, years or more. I feel such a deep work in me done and still never done.

Happy almost anniversary, we've come so far and have so much further to go.

You can stick a fork in me, but I know I'm not done. I know this because I pray a raw prayer (like the kind I prayed a few weeks ago cleaning my room and a Christmas song came on my playlist) and then spend the new few weeks listing the reasons that God should answer my prayer (clearly evidence that I haven't got the whole unmerited favor thing down yet), and then I spend the next few days beating up myself for not understanding God as Father better (who of you, if your son asked for fish, would give Him a snake?). (To be honest, I have nightmares almost weekly about snakes in Texas.)

See, I have this crazy, crazy thought that no matter what I do, it's not enough. I know none of you can relate. But stay with me here. I think that what I do really matters, like really, really matters. I think that what I do can change the world in one fell swoop, or at least change God's mind with enough cajoling. I think that.

But I don't believe that.

And I know I don't believe it, but it doesn't stop me from thinking it all the time.

I think that no matter what I do, a snake is going to find its way into my pantry or garage, even though I've asked (repeatedly) as a small favor from God: please don't ever let a snake get into my house.

And I think that no matter what I do, God doesn't want to answer my prayers.

So much so that I stopped praying. Well, I mostly just stopped asking. I prayed. I prayed a lot. But I stopped with the pleases and can-yous. I just stopped. This happened about a year and a half ago. I stopped asking and I stopped expecting. And then all of a sudden, he was answering my unasked prayers! Just like that, I didn't even ask for bread and bread showed up.

(Javier Bak)

So a few weeks ago, when I blurted out that unrehearsed prayer, when Christmas music made me think of what I want most in the world and I just asked, I felt embarrassed. I wanted to hide. I looked around to see if anyone noticed. Then I felt like a child.

Then I thought: no, I don't feel like a child.

A child would ask without embarrassment. Without hiding. Without fear.

A child asks for a fish and expects a fish.

And I'm still looking for a snake to appear.

The real fault, I'm finding, is not that I don't deserve what I want (and I don't), but that I still expect stones and snakes.

Dear Friends,

Ever since I learned the ten commandments it was the Sabbath keeping one that always shook me in my soul. Murder seemed an impossibility for me and lying was too hard to not do, but the Sabbath one--this seems foreign and impossible. How do you keep a day holy? A few years ago one of my heroes in the faith taught a class on sustainability and theology at my church and he talked about the year of Jubilee--again, a fascinating and near impossible feat: how do you shut down your livelihood, return your servants, rest your land and still live?

The idea is so fascinating to me. It seems to me the most tangible gift we can receive from God while still here on earth. The gift of rest, of nothing, really, emptiness, giving up and giving over.

The entire premise of the gospel is that we are set free, resting in His goodness alone and relying on Him for our complete provision.

And yet we are still spinning every wheel, sometimes double time, desperately trying to complete the work that only He can complete. Isaiah says this:

In repentance and rest is your salvation
In quietness and trust is your strength.

I'm declaring from now until the end of July a Sabbath rest for this blog and a few other things. I've scheduled blogs from the dusty archives for the month, nothing too heady or deep. Just some simple stuff to peruse and help me to feel less inclined to be present there.

So that's it. That's all. Thanks for reading. I appreciate you more than you'll ever know.

Really.

All the love in the world,
Me

P.S. I'll also be a little less present on facebook and twitter, if you keep up with me there. If you need to get a hold of me, email me here: loreferguson@gmail.com.

Growth within a grace context is more easily measured, I am learning, than growth within a law context.

As long as I am measuring my growth by what I do and do not do, I will always see more that I ought to be doing. The more I see, the less I want to do and growth is stunted. In grace, though, I am nearly blind to my doing, waking one day surprised to see the ground that's been taken. Struck by the besetting sins and habits that aren't even hunched in the corners of my closets anymore.

There are new ones, to be sure, but the old ones have taken their leave.

One of the best spiritual disciplines I've been assigned is to read through The Valley of Vision and rewrite prayers in my own words. Sometimes prayer feels stilted or repetitive, and this puts voice to some otherwise stale attempt. This past week I've been reading prayers in my head, praying them with my voice. But I also went back and reread some of my rewritten prayers from some really dark spiritual seasons.

And was surprised.

The Hudson River Valley--Cormack

The same prayers that are yielding such life to me today felt like funeral dirges to me a year, two years, four years ago. Because hopelessness was my bent, hopelessness was all I felt, even in the face of hope.

I meet so many people these days who feel hopeless in the face of their circumstances. God has taken leave of them, if feels and I know this feeling. I know it as clearly as I know the hope I have today. I am well acquainted with the shrugged shoulders and shaking head, the hard heart and weak or non-existent faith.

A few days ago in a study I'm doing at church, one of the questions was "Recall a situation in which you felt humbled by God."

The truth I am finding is that I am most humbled by God when I acknowledge the truth about how I see Him. Not the truth I want to see about Him. Not the truth that everyone else wants me to see about Him.

Just the way I see Him.

And if I am struggling to see His goodness or faithfulness or the hope He offers, I tell Him that.

Because He is not surprised by those feelings and He is not scrambling around trying to put me into situations where I'll be forced to see His fullness.

He is gentle and long-suffering and just and always on time.

And He does not change.

We go from glory to glory, faith to faith, doubt to doubt, and He stays the same. Always good, always faithful, always merciful, always just, always there. He is the best person to whom to confess your valley prayers.

He always abides on the mountains of grace.

I made a to-do list for today and didn't do anything on it. Instead I spent the morning responding to emails that have been building up in my inbox. Not the garden variety kind, either, the real deep nitty gritty life sort and there's still more to answer. I emptied my soul out a bit and when Season got home I emptied it more.

We're talking about long-term contentment, not the buckle down, house, three kids, 401K kind, because that's not really contentment, that's just filler stuff. We talked about how after the good feelings wear off, real life sets in.

How that's when contentment is the hardest.

I think I'm hitting it in these past few weeks. Eight months in Texas and now I'm home. In that time my understanding of the gospel has radically shifted the way my heart responds to God and sees Him, but the other thing that understanding has done has made the intensity with which I broach life even more intense. I'm discontent with any part of me that doesn't smell of the gospel and all I know is that that is most of me.

I'm weeping because a deep understanding of the love of Christ for us compels us and sometimes that compelling hurts. It's digs at the deep parts and exposes all the weak parts. I don't like to be exposed. I don't like to have to acknowledge that there are parts of me that have been untouched by the encompassing depth of the gospel. I don't like that.

I don't like that understanding the gospel means changing the way we interact with men, women, people, individuals who are all desperate for someone to reach out to them, show them love. I don't like that the gospel means stopping something when my only motivation is to feel good. I don't like that the gospel means that every relationship in my life is going to hit breaking point over and over and over again because we go from glory to glory, faith to faith. Because breaking points drive us to Christ all the more.

I'm discontent with some things right now. I'll just put that out there. I feel parched and dry.

I'm frustrated with a culture that isn't my own and is hard for me to understand. I'm tired of some things that seem unjustified. I'm weary of the perpetual plod toward complete sanctification. My soul is feeling bruised and prone to tears, homesick for the north, a culture and people I understand.

A friend sent me an email the other day that said "struggle is a metric for growth" and I'm thinking about that a lot this week. This soul sadness isn't a sign that I've been forgotten by God or that He is less than who I know Him to be, it's simply a way to say someday "see I was there, now I am here." Oswald Chambers said it this way,

"Growth in grace is measured not by the fact that you have not gone back, but that you have an insight into where you are spiritually; you have heard God say "Come up higher," not to you personally, but to the insight of your character."

And so today I going to embrace these struggles. I'm going to embrace the pioneer part of me that loves new and changing things, and I'm going to savor the settled part of me that desires to see changes that are sustainable and real.

And I am going to preach the gospel to every part of me that balks.

Which is most of me.

Of all the things I miss (which are few and real, like people), I miss my books the least.

One would think that having hauled around hundreds of books for a decade of my life, I would miss them. But I don't.

Instead I am learning to read.

I have been reading Tony Woodlief's Somewhere More Holy for about six months now. And by read, I mean I have been stealing snatches of it when the house is quiet and my soul is heavy, the former a rarity, the latter an often occurrence.

Today I am barely into chapter seven when Tony begins to talk about the unloved and unlovable:

It's a subtle poison that seeped into her skin, as it does many children. It's acidic, etching into your mind: these good things are no yours to have. If anyone tells you what a fine job you've done, think instead on your failings. When someone gets angry at you, instinctively assume he is right to do so. If someone offers you love, remember that he doesn't really know you. Maybe that's what keeps so many of us running from God--His awful claim to know us, as he peers out from beneath his blood-stained brow, whisper with thirst-swollen tongue that he loves us even now, even as He hangs on his man-fashioned cross. We run away shaking our heads and bitterly chuckling, thinking nobody in his right mind can look into the black hearts we secretly carry in our chests and still love us that way, that we can be lovable only so long as nobody really knows us.

I have to close the book. I have to lay it on the table in front of me.

Because my deepest fears are staring me in the face, in black and white, size 12, Times New Roman.

It is a subtle poison that has seeped into my skin. I call it the fear of being known, but really, the deeper fear is the fear of being unknown, unloved and unlovable.

For years of my life I have heard people talk about the love of God and the love they have for God and I have assumed that this love would not be mine to give or receive. Some of us are just not built that way, I would tell myself. Some of us just have different portions from God, I'd console myself.

But the truth is that it was still my greatest fear: that I would go through life soaked in this acidic poison, the poison of disregard. Unloved. Unlovable. Unable to love.

In the past year, in the unraveling of my faith and the new realization of what the gospel really means, I have felt this love birth in me and be toward me. And yet it still feels foreign. My first response is still to cower, to make excuses, to assume that anger or injustice toward me is right and good, to dwell on my failings. I am having to retrain my head in view of the gospel to respond with the gospel.

And it is hard.

It is hard because deep down within me I know that there is nothing good in me and even the most sincere kindness toward me is undeserved. It is difficult to know that I am nothing and He is everything, but because of my nothingness, He wants to give me everything. He isn't worried about me making a mockery of His gospel and this is what I most fear. Does my pitiful representation of Him mock the gloriousness of Who He Is?

Is my unloveliness disqualifying me from entering into His loveliness?
Is my unworthiness exempting me from partaking in His wholeness?
is my faithlessness removing me from resting in His goodness?

He is answering slowly, patiently, sometimes taking six months, sometimes longer, but answering no. No. Nothing disqualifies me from His love. Nothing.

I'm sure you haven't been wondering, but I'll tell you anyway:

Between this, this, this, this (singles), and this, I feel like I'm going to be a fat Christian conference hopper. I'm going to just thank Jesus that I live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, that I work for a non-profit with amazing connections, that I go to an amazing church who gives amazing discounts for weekends with stellar line-ups. But seriously, seriously? The Groaning Cosmos is the one I'm the most excited about. They'll be teaching through the book of Romans and it will be packed full of the gospel. I love that. I promise I won't get fat on conferences. I don't really like conferences. I'm just grateful is all.

This is Season, my roommate. Isn't she pretty?

Almost every day for the past few weeks, my two roommates and I have found ourselves sprawled out around the living room, on someone's bed, perched on counters and chairs, wherever really, just together. We've laugh hard, sometimes we've cried, we've been astounded by how good God is and how He shows that goodness to us, we've mourned, we've counseled, we've helped, we've encouraged. Sometimes I just marvel, I sit and listen to them when they think I'm not (like right now for instance), and I just marvel at how blessed I am.

This is my other roommate, Jenna. Also so pretty. (Also, I stole this pic from Seas.)

One of said roommates and I have been doing a (mostly) raw food cleanse for the past few weeks. It's been good. I've been eating mostly vegetarian for the past few years (for various reasons, ie. money, health, bleeding heart), but eating an almost entirely raw food diet is quite the experience. But I love green smoothies. I love them! Many of you know that about seven years ago I got pretty sick and since then have had food issues (let's just say that I pretty much constantly have an upset stomach). I also have had the worst allergies down here that I've had in my life. Well, just a few weeks in and I have not had ONE sinus headache and for the most part my stomach has been super agreeable. We'll see how this works long-term!

This was my Easter dinner! Spring rolls! Apropos, no?

Our green smoothies aren't the only thing green around here. If grass can be describes as mammoth-sized, let's just say ours is. It's hard living in a house you don't own and not really feeling a total sense of ownership over the lawn, especially when lawn care runs around $40 a week. None of us want to put that sort of monetary investment in this rough Texan...grass? weeds? viney-carpet? I don't know what one calls the stuff that covers a lot of the lawns here in Texas, but it sure isn't the pretty soft grass I envision when I think of summer. Tomorrow though, the other roommate is going to pick up a lawnmower that someone gave to us! Cool eh? No more mammoth grass.

This is a weed. From our yard. No, not that kind of weed. A regular old one.

Unfortunately the weeds that grow up around my heart are not so quickly dealt with. For the past four months I've been taking a class at my church called Steps. All I knew about Steps before I signed up was that 1. It was hard 2. It was good. I'm not one to shy from hard and I like good things, so I signed up. Let's just say that the past four months have been very telling to me. Last week I sat in Starbucks with a friend and shared some hard things about my fear and pride, things I knew were issues for me, but I'd pushed down, ignored, for a long time. The whole point of this course is to bring us to a deeper understanding of the gospel's finished work in us. That's it. Finished work. Finished. I have a hard time finishing anything. And so it's been such an amazing discovery for me to realize that I don't need to finish it, it's already been done for me. I love that.

I've been catching myself falling back into a pattern of works recently. I mess up, I shudder, I hide, I make excuses, I lose my joy, and I fear. God feels far from me and I feel even further from Him. The thing about grace is that some of us believe that it's too good and so we keep the law in front of us, to keep us in check. But some of us think we're too bad, and so we dismiss it entirely. The truth is that it IS too good and that we ARE too bad. And I love that. Because it doesn't make sense. I keep coming back to it. It surpasses my understanding and that's what makes it amazing.

Oh, and I bought a bike.

What shall I name her?

I'm awake early this morning, the Sunday morning lull of 114 traffic is too quiet for one who has grow accustomed to its constant rush. Birds instead are my morning music.

I think "Hosanna! Blessed is He Who comes in the name of the Lord."

I wonder what Hosanna means and what it meant to them so long ago, with their palm branches and crowded streets.

Save us! it meant. And I wonder how much peer pressure was present in that throng of ardent followers. Of course we crowd around the hope, we are all so desperate for the quick fix. Even if it comes born in a pile of straw and astride a mule to Passover. We will stoop to lowly depths if we think it will help.

Hosanna has changed, though, to mean something different: salvation has come!
Yet I wonder how it is that we are still desperate for the fix: save us!

Yesterday a teacher led us through Hebrews landing on an important truth: that Christ has sat down at the right hand of God. His work is finished. His plan is perfect. His gift of salvation is secure.

Yet we still cry, "Rescue us from this body of death!" "Save us!"

It is already and not yet, finished and yet not, secure and still ongoing.

This feels like a tease, but it is not. It is the tension which keeps us returning again and again to Christ and the tightness of His love for us. Unchanging and yet still being perfected.

A comfort.

No longer a need to find the quick fix, the quick healing, the quick windfall, the quick answer.

We are saved and we are being saved by His finished work on the cross. He did the work and is faithful to finish the work. No more need for throngs of ardent followers; He is interested in our faith, not our fandom.

In the language of grammar, Salvation is present, perfect and progressive: It is coming and has come and will come.

Blessed is He Who came in the name of the Lord.